Integrating Complementary and Alternative Medicine into Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Treatment

In the practice of Western medicine, individuals suffering from chronic pain usually seek medical care with the hope of obtaining a specific diagnosis and curative treatment. When a curative treatment is not available, patients then often expect and are given prescriptions for analgesic medications (“pain killers”) for pain relief. Unfortunately, however, specific diagnoses for most chronic pain problems are difficult to make, and treatments are rarely curative. Moreover, although analgesic medications can be effective in relieving acute pain in the short-term, their utility for treating chronic pain is controversial and efficacy is, at best, marginal (1). For example, in a recent review of the efficacy of various treatments for patients with chronic pain, it was noted that the average pain reduction for patients placed on long-term opioids is only 32% (2). In addition, anticonvulsants, tricyclic antidepressants, and topical preparations (considered the treatment of choice for neuropathic pain) seldom result in pain reductions to below a rating of 4 on 0 to 10 numerical scales. Turk (3) concluded that “. . . none of the currently available treatments eliminates pain for the majority of patients.” Thus, despite the availability of multiple biomedical treatments for chronic pain, there remains ample room for additional, and perhaps for some patients, even more efficacious treatments.